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The Garmin-Sharp-Barracuda team yesterday launched its new jersey, two days prior to the start of the Tour de France.

The team will be led by Giro winner Ryder Hesjedal who took an extended break from racing as he began his preparations for the Tour de France, but tomorrow in Liegè he’ll begin his campaign for a Giro-Tour double, last achieved by Marco Pantani in 1998.

The 24-year-old Peter Stetina, Garmin-Sharp-Barracuda, rode and completed his second Giro d’Italia playing a crucial support role in the mountains for Hesjedal. Stetina himself wore the best young rider jersey at this Giro on the journey to the team winning the final Maglia Rosa in Milan.

My first taste of European bicycle racing came to me in the form of beautiful, color photos taken by Graham Watson and printed in the pages of Winning Magazine in America. I still recall one of the story headlines: The Master is an American, which recounted the story of the World Championship road race. For the life of me, I cannot remember the words, just the fact that Greg LeMond had won the World Championships. Further in the pages of that magazine, I caught my first glimpse of Lo Scorpione. It was an amazingly simple, yet spellbinding logo that I had never seen before. I knew instantly that it was Greg’s team’s clothing brand, and, as I went on to discover, was the same brand being worn by many other greats in the sport of professional cycling of the day. “Only the great teams had clothing emblazoned with the Scorpion” Less than three years later, I signed my very first contract to become a professional cyclist. Unfortunately, my team’s clothing brand, although Italian, did not bear the Scorpion logo. At first it did not matter; I was getting paid to do exactly what I came to Europe to do, and ...

I’m at the Castelli 24 hour criterium in Feltre, northern Italy, and can’t remember the last time I had this much fun on two wheels. Between 4pm and 7:30pm yesterday I was racing around a 1.8km circuit in front of huge crowds against the likes of Manuel Boaro, Alessandro Ballan, Paolo Bettini, Matteo Tosatto,  and various amateur riders, Italian industry insiders and local weekend warriors

You have a couple of options on your last day at a Grand Tour. You can sleep late, get to the airport early and do some duty free shopping, or…you can drive 100 miles plus each way, to interview a man who has worn the maglia rosa twice in this race – Ryder Hesjedal.